Background
The modern ‘omics era has led to a gap between a generation of biotech leaders with experience in healthcare product development and an up-and-coming generation of scientists and engineers who know how to leverage the power of computational methods and big data. We bridge that gap via our product development experience, our team building experience, and our technical expertise.
We are experienced wet lab + computational “hybrid” scientists who work closely with founders to go from vision to design and execution of scientific strategies that will enable the next round of fundraising and create additional value opportunities. We can help design & execute foundational experiments, build computational biology teams, and get your drug or diagnostic to the clinic as efficiently as possible. Our primary goal is to help startups succeed through a common sense approach, robust scientific and engineering practices, and promoting capital efficiency.
We focus primarily on seed-stage startups but are also happy to work with larger companies (e.g., if they have ideas for new products or applications but may not have the resources to start making it happen). Our client portfolio includes therapeutics companies leveraging single-cell, synthetic biology, and microfluidics approaches, but we can work with biotech companies across many application spaces.
Mission & motivation
short term: To help startups succeed, to build teams and get stuff done. (We just like helping startups)
long term: We aim to increase the efficiency of drug & diagnostic development.
Our name
Init is short for initialize /iˈniSHəˌlīz/ -
to put in a condition appropriate to the start of a project or operation.
It is based on the first process run by an operating system (also the initialization function in the Python class constructor).
Team
Oliver Zill (Founder & Principal)
Oliver got started working in molecular biology during his undergrad at Columbia, followed by NYU and the FDA, doing immunology and virology research in the lab (2000-2004). He then did his PhD in molecular & cell biology focusing on basic yeast genetics and evolutionary genomics at UC Berkeley (completed 2010), where he invented new tools and methods for interspecies hybrid genetics. This work led to multiple first author publications and an award for the best thesis in Genetics over the preceding five years. During his PhD he realized that the advent of next-gen sequencing technology would revolutionize human health applications and open a vast world of applied genomics for diagnostics and therapeutics. This motivated postdoctoral research at UCSF on human cancer genomics, and further training in computational biology. Seeing a great opportunity to contribute to human health applications, he decided to join Guardant Health as an early employee in 2014 where he helped launch the Guardant360 liquid biopsy test, led clinical utility studies, and initiated and led the project team for what became the GuardantOMNI liquid biopsy test. He joined Genentech in 2017 to work on next-gen cancer immunotherapies (neoantigen vaccines and T cell therapies), and led the Personalized TCR-T cell therapy team as well as a research group in Oncology Bioinformatics. He has been fortunate to work alongside world-class R&D teams and is grateful for all he has learned along the way from many talented and experienced leaders.
Neeraj Rao (Business Development Lead)
Neeraj Rao has over 20 years of experience in the biotechnology industry. His experience ranges from co-founding a venture-backed consumer genomics startup to senior business development roles at companies including Illumina, Luminex, and Battelle. He graduated with a B.S. in Biochemistry from UC San Diego and received his MBA from the Vanderbilt Owen Graduate School of Management.
Join us
We are actively looking for co-founders, experienced scientists, and bioinformaticians to join us. Part-time and full-time opportunities available, hybrid and remote. Please drop us a line along with your CV at the link below.
